Delicacy - A Review

French novelist and screenwriter Foenkinos tells the story of Natalie and Markus, two young coworkers traversing the uneasy terrain between love and friendship.

Natalie's life abruptly halts when her husband of seven years dies. With barely enough energy to continue on, Natalie returns to work but allows her friendships to lapse and her love life to disintegrate into nothingness. Enter Markus, a self-effacing Swede, who stumbles into her office at precisely the right moment. Taken over by the need to feel feminine, Natalie gives into a sudden and impulsive act that sends both her and Markus down a muddled path toward love. As with all stories of would-be-lovers, a number of obstacles are thrown in their way. Natalie and Markus must contend with their lovesick boss, Charles, and a horde of nosy coworkers who can't seem to understand Natalie's interest in the geeky Markus. The reader, unfortunately, will have to contend with the opposite problem as they are left to wonder what is so magnificent about Natalie. The fault lies with Foenkinos’s decision to present Natalie as a feminine ideal rather than a fully fleshed character. He tells the reader of Natalie’s love of reading, fascination with Pez dispensers, and educational background. None of these facts, however, make her personality any more decipherable as Foenkinos focuses more on her beauty than her character. Foenkinos's stylistic prose can also be faulted for this lack of character depth. This is unfortunate since his prose is also his greatest strength. The narrative style of Delicacy can best be described as ethereal ¾ concerned far more with style than substance. The reader sorts through pages and pages of aesthetically appealing prose without finding any true emotional connection to the characters. Hearts are broken and love restored, but the reader has difficulty caring. Foenkinos may believe that pretty words are an acceptable substitute for characters and story, but the reader may not be so convinced.

Delicacy is a meringue of a novel, and those wishing for meatier fiction should look elsewhere.

My Neglected Classics

I started reading The Flight of Gemma Hardy earlier this week but found it boring.  Instead of forcing myself to finish it, I decided to sort through my bookshelves and find some books I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten around to picking up.  Now, I have a nice little pile of to-be-read books including Rebecca, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Out of Africa.  At present, I'm reading Awakening by Kate Chopin, and I'm truly loving it.  I haven't read much literature since I graduated with my English degree, and I'm just now recalling how much I love reading the classics.  This is going to be the year I finally pick up all those George Eliot, Frances Burney, and John Galsworthy books I've been leaving to languish on my shelves.

First Person

Through junior high and most of high school, I refused to read first person narratives. I hated them with a passion because I had come across so many that were poorly executed. I now read first person narratives, and truth be told, some of my favorite are written in this way. I do, however, still come across quite a few that I can finish. Here are some of the reasons why:

Top Three First Person Narratives Pet Peeves:

1. There are multiple viewpoints, but everyone sounds the same. I have read so many books like this — men, women, and children of different backgrounds all sound the same. It is impossible and shows such a weakness on the writer’s part that I have to stop reading before I simply through the book across the room. If the narrator is first person, I like to be able to tell the identity of the viewpoint character just by their speech patterns and not by having their name at the top of the chapter. No two people sound exactly the same. If an author can’t write multiple viewpoints properly, she should write in third person and save themselves and the readers from consternation. (One book that defies this trap is The Help. The Help had three viewpoint characters and each had rich personal tones.)

2. Everyone sounds like a poet/professor of English Literature. Literary fiction writers should avoid first person at all costs. It doesn’t work as very few people other than literary fiction writers soliloquize in their heads. I can’t stand reading about children, soldiers, uneducated maids who speak in poetic narrative. It might be pretty, but its not believable. I have heard wonders upon wonders about The Shadow of the Wind. I wanted to like it, but I could not get past the fact that the narrator, who was a children, spoke to the reader like he was a professor of English. The book might have been wonderful, but I couldn’t get past that first person barrier to the good stuff.

3. Men sound like women, and women sound like men. Sometimes an author can successfully write a first person narrative for a character of the opposite sex. It does happen. Unfortunately, it too often fails miserably. If I begin a book not knowing the gender of the main character, I will make a guess based on their tone and syntax. There have been times, only when authors are writing as the opposite sex, that I have gotten it wrong. This was the case most recently with The Art of Civility. I was certain that the main character was a man for the first several pages, but then she began talking about her husband. I put down the book immediately, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to appreciate whatever story was to come because of that glaring distraction. The Maximum Ride books are also like this. I was sure Max was a boy for a really decent sized chunk of that first book. I really wish editors would notice this sort of thing and tell the writers to change narrative style. It would make everything so much less annoying for the rest of us.

Below Stairs - A Review

With the present success of the British television series Downton Abbey, St. Martin’s Press has re-released the classic memoir, Below Stairs. In Below Stairs, Margaret Powell recounts her career in domestic service and vividly recreates the world in which she lived.

As a child, Margaret Powell hoped to become a teacher, but her family was poor and there was no public assistance to pay for her education. Instead, she entered the workforce at the age of thirteen. For two years, she worked a series of odd jobs in her hometown of Hove, culminating in her dismissal from a laundry service for turning fifteen (the laundry wished to avoid giving her a half a crown raise). Her mother then decided it was time for her to enter domestic service. Margaret began her career with a position as a lowly kitchen maid but within three years, rose to the rank of cook through hard work and a bit of lying.

The joy I felt in reading Below Stairs had little to do with my fondness for Downton Abbey and much more to do with Margaret’s unique voice and the world she describes so clearly. Through her no-nonsense narration, we are transported back to the time between wars. Margaret introduces the reader to a post-World War I England in which everything has changed and yet many of its people are still reticent about moving forward. Many of Margaret’s employers were once something but are now forced to live on dwindling fortunes with only the good, old days to keep them company. Courtship no longer resembles that of Victorian England, and Margaret struggles to keep up as she searches for a husband. Women, in general, struggle to gain autonomy while society struggles with accepting them as independent, single women. Daily life now includes bicycling, car rides, cinema, and theater going. It’s a fascinating time, and Margaret allows the reader to experience it all through the eyes of a firsthand observer.

Throughout Below Stairs, Margaret guides us through her world with a straightforward and feisty voice. The reader becomes well acquainted with her and, by the last page, are reluctant to say good-bye to her and her world.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight - A Review

Was it fate that lead Hadley to miss her plane to London by only four minutes or was it mere coincidence? In The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, Hadley considers such heavy material as fate, love, and marriage as she travels to London for her father's wedding and very possibly meets the boy of her dreams.

A series of mishaps leads Hadley to be late for her flight to London; this isn't terrible news for Hadley as she was dreading the trip to her father's wedding anyway. Unfortunately, she is able to get a seat on the next flight out -- one that will arrive just in time for her to be able to fulfill her bridesmaid duties. As she waits at the airport, she has a chance encounter with Oliver, a handsome, young Brit, who assists her with her luggage as she wanders through the airport. Oliver and Hadley strike up a conversation in the cafeteria that lasts through the entire flight to London. As they get to know each other, Hadley wonders if she and Oliver were meant to meet, and if so, does that mean they are meant to meet again?

Jennifer E. Smith's book is a lovely, little romantic comedy -- perfect for both teens and adults. The reader is immediately drawn into Hadley's drama as she frets over her father's remarriage and her sense of abandonment. We commiserate with her as she deals with her anxiety inducing claustrophobia, and we root for her to find hope and a little bit of happiness on her trip to London. When Oliver comes into her life, Hadley is given that gleam of hope, and it is enjoyable to watch as Oliver becomes a friend and confidant to Hadley just when she needs it most. From here, the story takes a fairly predictable path. And yes, we may have seen this all before in any number of romantic comedies, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable here.

The characters in Smith's book are relatable and likeable, and the story is a perfect balance between sugary sweet comedy and emotional family drama. It is a fun, light read and highly recommended for anyone wishing to renew their belief in love and destiny.

A Train in Winter - A Review

A Train in Winter tells the fascinating story of the French resistance during World War II. The author, Caroline Moorland, focuses her book on the women of the French resistance. These women might not wield guns or plant bombs, but they do house refugees in their hotels, print papers in their basements, and hand out flyers in the streets. These women chose to risk their lives rather than run to safety or simply endure. The women are grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and children, and all are drawn into the fight for different reasons. Some women fight for their children’s futures. Others fight for those who are being oppressed. Others still fight because they wish to continue the work of their arrested husbands, brothers, and fathers. A Train in Winter follows these women as they endure arrests at the hands of both the French and Nazis, torture and starvation in the death camps, and watching as all those they hold dear die around them.

Reading the introduction and book jacket, I expected something entirely different from A Train in Winter. I expected the author to focus more on the personal experiences of the women in the resistance and less on the overarching, historical events. Unfortunately, there are a minimum of fifty women mentioned in A Train in Winter, making it impossible for the reader to connect with any of the women. I would have much preferred Moorland to focus on several women rather than including everyone. The book would have been much better if she had alternated between chapters with background information and chapters with selections from her interviews. As it was, I couldn’t keep anyone straight and felt no connection to the women or their stories. The book lacked a sense of purpose and strength because of this excess of information. It became merely a dry, history book about an interesting topic, instead of the celebration of women and the friendships that kept them alive.

Everneath - A Review

Brodi Ashton’s Everneath is a modern day retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the first book in a series centered around Persephone and her underworld kingdom.

This young adult novel tells the story of Nikki Beckett, a teenage girl with only six months left until she is forced to return to the underworld or Everneath, When the story opens, she is just waking up from a hundred year sleep in which an Everling, Cole, has absorbed her energy by stealing her emotions. Few survive this process and even fewer come through unscathed, but Nikki is special, making it through with some pieces of her personality in tack. While Cole wishes her to join him as an Everling, she chooses to return to the surface, hoping to rejoin her family and reunite with boyfriend, Jack. Although a hundred years has passed for her, only six months have passed for her family and friends. Six months, however, is long enough for everything to have changed. When she returns, her father is suspicious and angry, and her friends are emotionally scarred by her disappearance. Nikki hopes to spend her remaining time healing the hurts she caused by leaving and also in finding a way to avoid returning to the Everneath.

Everneath is a brilliant concept with its basis set firmly in the myths of Persephone and Eurydice. With the Everneath, Brodi Ashton creates a suitably scary and original underworld filled with ghostly sludge and hive-like caverns. Her concept of skimming emotions for energy appears to be an interesting new spin on the ever popular vampire genre. Overall, she successfully takes a popular myth and creates her own original spin on it. The difficulty with Everneath, however, does not lie in the concept or in Ashton’s world creation. Ashton creates a very vivid world but, unfortunately, chooses to populate it with flat characters. Our heroine, Nikki Beckett, has no personality, and the male leads, Cole and Jack, are uncomfortably abusive and domineering. Nikki has no hobbies or interests outside Jack and knitting. She does nothing to forward the story and instead, stops things dead by stalwartly refusing to do anything. She stands by while Jack and Cole battle over her and do all the legwork. These three characters have been seen in various incarnations since Twilight,but here they are at their most uninteresting to date.

Brodi Ashton tries but ultimately fails to make Everneath a truly compelling debut. Nikki Beckett’s dullness makes it impossible for this book to succeed; and since there are plenty of young adult novels with interesting heroines, I would recommend readers seek those out rather than looking for signs of life in Everneath.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the author is a fan of Castle. Nikki Beckett? Maybe a combo of Nikki Heat and Kate Beckett? Hmmm … )